"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"for 27 November 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Geekquake, or, I Hear America Whining

Two years after the brilliant DejaNews was transformed
into the swap 'n' stop portal
Deja, the
lamentations
haven't ceased. Now a succession of layoffs (long ago
prefigured by wacky alliance-forging and a
desperate
privacy sellout or two) suggest Deja's
misplacement
of most of its Usenet archive was just the beginning
of a long digital nightmare. The community of DejaNews
hawks, not content to see the problem as one of
competence
when a grand saga of corporate intrigue will do, are
hounding the company to restore
its pre-1999 archives; and in this one instance, the
geeks' acute (if ever-present) sense of injury may be
worth our attention.

Come join us at the
Mediabistro
mixer, as exiles from Deja's old New York staff engage in the
only economic activity that has survived intact throughout the
great web wipeout  bellyaching about your e-employer. It's no easy
task to finger one bad egg from among the communal
dirty
dozen or so. Spy magazine co-founder and
Disney's Gasoline Alley-cat, Deja CEO Tom
Phillips, is an easy
target, but most of the laid-off New Yorkers blame the
failure of Deja on those dadblamed DejaNews techies in
Austin, who, hostile to the product ratings shell
tacked onto their shrine, dragged their feet and all
but sabotaged the new Deja.

We're betting the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
Those MSN and Ziff veterans hired by Phillips thought they'd found
a
plan for extracting value from the all-Usenet
asset, while honoring the old
Yahoo! Internet Life tenets that Usenet was a
scary place where innocents could be stalked and
flamed by Unix-using rapists.

The nougat inside all those other shells was the
shell-master himself, DejaNews founder and chairman Steve
Madere, yet another disenfranchised OS/2
programmer who said nuts to IBM and went on to cook up
the fairly unexciting but extremely useful idea of
accessing Usenet through a web browser. This gave way,
in the cornucopian high-tech harvest, to the stupendous utility of archiving every
single Usenet post for subsequent search-and-recall at
will. Like a magic wand, DejaNews transformed Usenet
just when "tech support" had dissolved into mailto:
oblivion. Suddenly there was a living ultra-FAQ for
hardware and software questions, a nebbish's ultimate
leverage. Invisibly and almost effortlessly, you could
seek and get answers from inside a damp, moldy,
rat-filled warehouse filled with a billion answers to
a million questions.

At the same time, the advent of DejaNews stoked the
psychoses of balmy usenuts already insensate with
dreams of mind control. With electronic immortality
conferred upon your every arbitrary mind fart and
insipid sig file, could world domination be far
behind? Or failing that, post-mortal apotheosis,
perpetual argumentative one-upmanship, or even just
bragging rights  why, someday you could dandle
your grandson in your lap and tell him what you had
for breakfast
the
day you burned the butt-hairs off that defaming
revisionist.

But rather than extending and embracing the
DejaNews brand, the new Deja left its zealous audience members with
the feeling of having woken up, Day of the Triffids-like,
and found themselves unable to see their beloved Usenet prattle
for the fleaspeck type, product ratings, partnership ads, and
freshly-minted "communities"
(single-member singles clubs, illness support groups, scam getaways).
For a geek community that lives in constant, nameless terror of
corporate domination, the new, improved Deja proved as welcome
as Lupus.

Underlying the backlash was the fear that the Deja design
changes would somehow
result in less than full-frontal BBS wanking.
Even now, the milquetoast, Xanax-y sound of branded
message boards owes a debt in reassuring patriarchal
soma to at least one shadow-marketing tool of the
closed online bulletin-board services  the fear
that if you weren't paying two bucks an hour to CIS
you could somehow lose your life if your modem
short-circuited and/or the numbers in your headers
added up to 666. This flight from freedom has been
carried onto "virtual web communities." Since Usenet
offers an uncut (and thus, by some lights, preferable)
grade of vituperation, your
would-be community
builder would just as soon you
not
believe there is another better, cheaper
neighborhood, offering all the demented
cultural history and
Joseph
Estrada conspiracy theories you can stomach.
Indeed, Usenet has provided the necessary object
lesson of a scary street scene, since communities are
really defined by whom they exclude. You could call
them different kinds of architectures: One is a sort
of powder-room
confessional, another hosts lunchroom
gossip. Usenet is the great outdoors, street
theatre, agora, gutter opera. On Usenet your
community is as likely to be done in
by foul-mouthed hooligans as it is to become the main forum for
worldwide stone skipping.

What is most sad in this story is that, although Deja made no real
effort to tame its Usenet beast, the idea that it might was enough to
make the company a target of geeks.
The lesson here may be something about the fragility
of trust. Or maybe it's just that,
while you might make a lot of money on Usenet (then
again
you
might not) it's hard to make it from
Usenet. It's kind of like trying to harness the power
of copulation to run your toaster. The motive force of
electrons aroused through passions either tumescent or
emotional doesn't easily convert into bucks.

This being a Usenet discussion, it's time
to invoke the Führer, and turn our attention
to those whose orders were being followed.
Phillips
might seem ripe to take the blame, but ask yourself, would you have done
any differently? Imagine the
presentation made by the marketing geniuses sometime
back in 1998. Think of the 8 1/2-by-11 cardboard folios
placed at each cushy conference room seat. Look up
toward the front of the darkened room at the
PowerPoint slides depicting hordes of Usenet sheep
being led through pens. Some of those sheep
will wander off to be shorn of their furry buyer's
ratings on tires, CD players, and tranquilizers, which
will then be woven and offered to the smarter, lazier
but really cooler New Yorker subscribers, who
unlike those
damnably
thrifty geeks have a demographic as opposed to an
arrest record. Though naturally, explains the
marketing man, a substantial percentage of the fools
taken in by the ad campaigns will return to be
clipped, the base is the Usenet junkies who can be
relied on to return again and again.

And if they don't, he should have added, maybe Epinions will buy out what's left.